(ix) Preface

"Throughout the Christian era, as Susan Sontag has observed, sex has been treated as a ‘special case’. Since at least the eighteenth century it has also been the focus simultaneously of ‘scientific’ exploration and political activity. This book asks whether, as a result of all this concern, we are any more sure today than we were in the reputed Dark Ages of the last century about the ‘real’ meaning of sexuality. Over a hundred years of theoretical debate and sex research, social morality crusades and radical oppositions, definitions and self-definition, have produced a crisis of sexual values in which many fixed points have been radically questioned and where contending forces battle for the future of sexuality. The aim of the book is to show the historical, theoretical and political forces that have created the framework of this crisis of sexual meanings." [mijn nadruk] (ix)

"From this starting point, the book seeks to analyse the complex historical interactions between sexual theory and sexual politics over the past century, in order to question the neutrality of sexual science and to challenge its hegemonic claims. In particular, what are the meanings of such concepts as ‘identity’, consent and choice if we reject the idea of a ‘true sex’? These themes contribute to another task, an understanding of the sexual present, a peculiar combination of old oppressions and new opportunities, and of contending moral and political positions. By linking our present discontents to a clear understanding of the past and a realistic hope for the future, I hope to contribute to a more rational and optimistic vision of the subject of sex than is currently on offer from either right or left." [mijn nadruk] (x)

[En weer vele dankbetuigingen ... Zo sociaal, al die auteurs ... ]

(1) Part One - Sexuality and its discontents

(3) Chapter 1 - Introductory: the subject of sex

"Sexuality is as much about words, images, ritual and fantasy as it is about the body: the way we think about sex fashions the way we live it. We give a supreme importance to sex in our individual and social lives today because of a history that has assigned a central significance to the sexual. It has not always been so; and need not always be so. "(3)

[Maar maken we seks belangrijk om het te veroordelen of maken we seks belangrijk om ervan te kunnen genieten? Sterker nog: wat betekent zo'n uitdrukking als dat we 'seks zo belangrijk maken'?]

"Sex exists today in a moral vacuum. In the resulting confusion and uncertainty there is a temptation to retreat into the old verities of ‘Nature’ or to search for new truths and certainties, a new absolutism. I want in this book to reject both paths — to offer instead a clarification of the real, complex but resolvable problems that confront us. We do not need a new morality: rather we should seek ways of living which recognise different beliefs, desires — and moralities." [mijn nadruk] (3-4)

[Dat idee - absolute zekerheden gebaseerd op 'de natuur' - is inderdaad een slechte benadering. Maar het idee van het naast elkaar laten bestaan van allerlei 'moralities' kan net zo goed leiden tot schijntolerantie, tot het niet aanpakken van intolerantie.]

"Sexuality today is, perhaps to an unprecedented degree, a contested zone. It is more than a source of intense pleasure or acute anxiety; it has become a moral and political battlefield."(4)

[Niet bepaald een moreel vacuum dus, integendeel.]

"This body of work was sparked off by the emergence at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s, in America, Europe and elsewhere, of the feminist, lesbian and gay movements."(5)

Het leidde tot drie boeken. Het eerste stelde dat er geen sprake kon zijn van 'de' homoseksueel of 'de' heteroseksueel. Het verzette zich tegen essentialistisch identiteitsdenken en benadrukte de variatie. Je komt dan ook uit op de historische / maatschappelijke / politieke aspecten van definitie en zelfdefinitie, van regulatie, en zo verder. Dat werd het tweede boek.

"Sexuality as a contemporary phenomenon is the product of a host of autonomous and interacting traditions and social practices: religious, moral, economic, familial, medical, juridical. Capitalist social relations do certainly set limits and pressures on sexual relations as on everything else; but a history of capitalism is not a history of sexuality."(6)

Seksuologie krijgt hierbij speciale aandacht, omdat veel van de huidige opvattingen een achtergrond hebben in die seksuologie.

"Their work has been appropriated, deployed, utilised and occasionally distorted in a variety of social arenas and forms. They cannot be blamed individually or even perhaps collectively for the world we live in. We are, after all, actors in that world. But their legacy is one that needs to be exhumed, re-examined and probably rejected before we can write a new agenda."(7-8)

[Nogal negatief geformuleerd allemaal. Waar komt die negativiteit uit voort? Weeks vindt opnieuw dat daar essentialistisch gedacht wordt. ]

"Possibly the most potent of their legacies is what is now generally known as ‘sexual essentialism’. Throughout this book I shall challenge ways of thinking which reduce a phenomenon to a presupposed essence — the ‘specific being’, ‘what a thing is’, ‘nature, character...substance...absolute being’ (Oxford English Dictionary) — which seeks to explain complex forms by means of an identifying inner force or truth. The sexologists have spent a great deal of their energies in seeking the ‘truth of sex’ — in biology usually, in the instinct, the chromosomes and hormones, the DNA, the genes, or less often, but powerfully, in psychic energy or unconscious compulsions. The belief that sex is an overpowering force which the social/moral/medical has to control is an old and deeply rooted one, and central to the western, Christian traditions (though not invariably to others). Sexologists worked to give this a scientific basis and concern. The result has been, I believe, disastrous, because it has always made the battle for, or against, this sexual force the chief focus of sexual writing. Within such a Manichean perspective it has been impossible to confront, let alone answer, key questions — about identity, pleasure, power, choice — which bedevil the domain of sex. Certain questions have not been posed because they could not be asked within the old frame of reference." [mijn nadruk] (8)

Een historische aanpak is nodig, maar dan wel 'as politics'.

"The third way is to see ‘history as politics’. This involves understanding the fundamental connections of history and politics, to grasp the ways in which the past has a hold on, organises and defines, the contemporary memory. The aim here is to understand ‘the present’ as a particular combination of historical forces, to find out how our current political dilemmas have arisen, to provide a historical perspective on political decisions, and to see the present as historical." [mijn nadruk] (10)

Weeks geeft vervolgens een overzicht van de inhoud van dit boek.

"The psychoanalytic tradition, however distorted it has been by moralistic assertions, does offer, I believe, major insights into the possibility of a non-essentialist theory of sexuality and gender."(11-12)

[Daar kan ik me helemaal niets bij voorstellen. Als er één theorie universele pretenties heeft en essentialistisch is is het wel de psychoanalyse.]

"Finally, the book closes with a political and polemical conclusion, with the aim not of foreclosing debate but of suggesting issues that should be central to it. These chapters are contributions to the development of what I call a ‘radical pluralist’ position, whose advocacy is the ultimate purpose of this book. It is a perspective built on the range of sexual possibilities, not on their denial." [mijn nadruk] (12)

"I belong to a generation which hoped for a great deal from the ‘sexual revolution’ and what was called ‘sexual liberation’. For many, sexual freedom seemed to offer not only an expansion of areas of private choice but also a (perhaps the) key to wider social transformation. As I write, however, my bookshelves are beginning to groan with the wordy products of those who have hastily, often in pain and anguish, sometimes with lucrative publishing contracts, retreated from that particular battlefield. Sexual freedom, it seems, far from being an opportunity, was a delusion, a god that failed." [mijn nadruk] (13)

"The retreat from any rational idea of sexual freedom and sexual change feeds into the deepening conservatism of our time — has in fact been essential to it — and the apostasy now is just as overindulgent and destructive as the glorification of sexual excess was then." [mijn nadruk] (13)

[Wonderlijk. Klinkt erg gedesillusioneerd, ja. Maar Weeks kan toch ook weten dat die opvattingen slechts onder een kleine groep leefden en dan nog vaak totaal ondoordacht, zonder bijvoorbeeld enig besef van machtsverhoudingen, rollenpatronen, dubbele moraal, etc.. Seksuele vrijheid is geen (des)illusie, seksuele vrijheid is nog nooit op de juiste manier gerealiseerd. Daarom speelt het de conservatieven in de kaart als we opgeven er in te geloven.]

(15) Chapter 2 - The ‘sexual revolution’ revisited

"Sexual standards varied then, as they do now, between different classes and regions, religious, racial and ethnic groups. The dominant moral values which twentieth-century radicals have inveighed against and social puritans have mourned — the marital ethic, the taboos on non-genital sexuality, the stigma against non-marital relations and illegitimacy, the privileging of heterosexuality and the ostracisation of homosexuality — were only ever precariously hegemonic (though their victims might have wished they were more precarious), sustained by varying social, medical and legal forces, constantly challenged, and frequently ignored. There was no Golden Age of sexual propriety, and the search for it in a mythologised past tells us more about present confusions than past glories." [mijn nadruk] (15-16)

[Hm, ik vind dat een rare al te relativerende opvatting. Er was wel degelijk een breed gedragen dominante en afgedwongen ideologie over seksualiteit, ook al werd er in de praktijk geregeld van afgeweken. Het afwijken wordt hier al te belangrijk gemaakt.]

"This has produced a crisis over sexuality: a crisis in the relations of sex, especially in the relations between men and women, but also, perhaps more fundamentally, a crisis around the meaning of sexuality in our society. In the resulting confusion there has been an unprecedented mobilisation of political forces around sexual issues. A hundred years ago the possibility of a sexual politics was virtually unthinkable. Today it is commonplace on Right and Left, with the Right taking the initiative more eagerly than the Left. Sex has become a potent political issue because of a perplexing and seemingly endless conflict of beliefs as to the appropriate ways of living our sexualities." [mijn nadruk] (16)

"At stake is the legacy of the so-called ‘sexual revolution’ of the past generation. For many — though not all — progressives during the first two-thirds of the present century the call for ‘sexual freedom’ has been one of the touchstones of radical intent. That was always an ambiguous ambition — freedom from whom, by what means, at whose expense? — and its achievement today seems even more ambivalent. Terms like the ‘sexual revolution’ and ‘permissiveness’ have been jumbled together as loose descriptions of the changes that have occurred — but their meaning is opaque. This has not stopped the sceptics, doubters and plain opportunists from rallying against them. The rise of ‘permissiveness’ has been much heralded and much reviled. Its fall now appears imminent." [mijn nadruk] (17)

[Het is duidelijk dat Weeks een hekel heeft aan al die pleidooien en bewegingen voor seksuele vrijheid en toegeeflijkheid / tolerantie. Toch is me nog niet helemaal duidelijk waarom. Hij zegt terecht: vrijheid van wie, voor wie, ten koste van wie? Maar dat kun je dan toch verder uitwerken? Hij noemt die tolerantie een mythe. Wil hij dan als Thatcher discipline en zelfbeheersing? Hopelijk kan hij het uitleggen.]

"In the struggle between old and new, tradition and the modern, virtue and vice, the 1960s appear as the key moment of transition, the decisive meeting place of conflicting values. In the writings of neo-Conservatives, New Rightists, and moral puritans alike ‘the sixties’ stand for all that has gone wrong. This was the key moment of ‘moral collapse’ for the proponents of the new morality, and the source of the detritus that marks and mars our contemporary world.

If it were only explicitly conservative forces that revelled in attacking the supposed ‘excesses’ of the 1960s then we might acknowledge its organising force, but perhaps reject its representative nature. The peculiarity is that the reaction against that dramatic but historically heterogeneous decade has a wider resonance in at least two other quarters. In the ranks of those we might call ‘disillusioned liberals’ (many of whom, of course, gravitate fairly easily to the growing ranks of the new conservatism) there is a developing argument also that in the 1960s ‘things went radically astray’. For them the sexual legacy of the 1960s is seen in an epidemic of venereal disease as much as in greater sexual choice, in the rise of an aggressive language of sexual abuse as much as in greater verbal freedom, in the worship of quantitative sex as much as a qualitative change in human relations."(18)

[Maar maakten die mensen in de 60-er jaren bewuste keuzes en droegen ze verantwoordelijkheid voor zichzelf en anderen of waren het meelopers die lekker profiteerden van dat 'alles kon' en op een gegeven moment de kous op de kop kregen? En hoe groot was de groep die hier in mee ging? De meerderheid bleef waarschijnlijk even conservatief, degenen in de seksuele revolutie namen dat conservatieve mee vanuit huis (hun opvoeding, hun milieu), hun streven naar 'seksuele vrijheid' was in veel gevallen gewoon puberaal verzet.]

"The real ‘prisoners of sex’ in this argument are the persons who believed too ardently in the claims of the pioneers of permissiveness — amongst whom ‘the sexologists’ are prominent — and who found in their pursuit of sexual achievement and success a new penance. They are experiencing, in well advertised anguish and guilt, a revenge from the swinging sixties."(18-19)

"The ‘sexual revolution’ that supposedly took place in the 1960s is therefore, by definition, a male-oriented one which subordinated women ever more tightly to the heterosexist norm. From this belief stems a strong, often violently worded, rejection of that decade, and all its works."(19)

[Vandaar dat ook feministes kritiek hebben op die seksuele revolutie:]

"By a curious twist, radical feminism finds a common target with its ostensible ideological enemies in feeding the new puritanism of our time."(19)

[Maar waren ze ook niet erg blij met die seksuele recvolutie? Is dit wel een goede historische weergave? Zoals Weeks zelf zegt: er is enorm veel ruimte gekomen voor alternatieve seksualiteiten, er wordt gemakkelijker over gepraat, en zo meer. Is die seksuele revolutie echt wel zo mislukt als Weeks suggereert?]

"There is evidence that attitudes more or less gradually relaxed, towards birth control, abortion, divorce, pre-marital and extra-marital sex, cohabitation and homosexuality — and this slow change in attitudes has continued into the 1980s despite an increasingly conservative political climate in the United States and Europe."(19-20)

[Precies. En nee, die seksuele revolutie was niet een homogene ontwikkeling die zich overal tijdens de 60-er jaren voltrok. Natuurlijk niet. Open deur.]

"If we look at the period fairly schematically four sets of changes seem particularly important in shaping the current situation: the continuing, even accentuating, commercialisation and commodification of sex; the shift in relations between men and women; changes in the mode of regulation of sexuality; and the emergence of new, or the re-ordering of old, social antagonisms and the appearance of new political movements. These provide the framework for the contemporary sexual crisis. " [mijn nadruk] (21)

[Weeks gaat ze vervolgens bespreken. Ik vind het een hogelijk abstracte weergave van wat er allemaal veranderd zou zijn. Ik denk concreter en denk dan aan: je minder schamen, seks meer accepteren als normaal, durven experimenteren met seks, naaktheid niet meer raar vinden, in die lijn.]

Commercialisation and commodification of sex

"The purposes of ‘business’ and ‘morality’ often clashed — and the latter frequently lost. By the end of the nineteenth century sections of the English working class had established an intricate evangelical type moralism of its own, but had created it out of its own experience rather than from simple acceptance of ‘respectability’. If we look at attitudes to prostitution, birth control and abortion, marriage and divorce, even homosexuality, we find different class standards, the co-existence of different standards within the same class — and of course a constant gap between belief and behaviour. Capitalism did not create a personality type to fit its needs, let alone a sexual morality that was essential to the success of capital accumulation."(22)

[Dat kapitalisme geen boodschap heeft aan moraal, dat snap ik. De rest is weer eens vaag. Wat betekent de tweede zin bijvoorbeeld? Vervolgens toch het standpunt dat de toenemende economische overvloed / de consumptiemaatschappij leidde tot veranderende opvattingen over seks. Masturbatie werd vanaf de 50-er en 60-er jaren als normaal gezien, zegt Weeks, en pornografie sprong daar op in. Ik betwijfel dat het zo simpel ligt. In welke milieus? Bij welke sekse? etc. Bij welke leeftijd?]

"Not only was sex an area that could be colonised by capitalism; it was also one that could expand ever more exotically. The increasing separation of eroticism from procreation, itself in part a product of technological developments within capitalism with the development of efficient means of birth control, opened up the way for the proliferation of new desires as the pursuit of pleasure became an end in itself. Much of this was potentially liberating, as the sex-procreation nexus was definitively broken up. But at the same time it provided the possibility for the commoditisation of pleasure." [mijn nadruk] (24)

[Seks als koopwaar was er altijd al. Er was alleen sprake van schaalvergroting. Waarschijnlijk is dat wat Weeks bedoelt. Maar dan nog kun je je afvragen wat een en ander met de alledaagse seksualiteit in menselijke relaties te maken heeft. Dat mensen technische middelen kopen en gebruiken - anticonceptie, seksspeeltjes, spannende blaadjes en films -, hoe vaak komt dat onder de 'gewone mensen' voor? En wat voor effect heeft dat op sekuele relaties?]

"By the 1970s explicit sexuality (or at least of a heterosexual sort) pervaded the social consciousness from newsstands to televisions, from private clubs to theatres and cinemas, from advertising billboards to street life. A new community of knowledge projected sex into all corners of social life. And America led the way."(25)

Shifts in sexual relations

"There is plentiful evidence for such a sexualisation. In much of the advanced industrialised world there has been a progressive increase in female pre-marital sex, so that today the majority of women do experience sex before marriage. (...) There is a similar increase in the incidence of extra-marital sex." [mijn nadruk] (26)

"But the reality and significance of the changes that did occur were tempered by other realities, of women’s continued familial dependence, of their recurrent exploitation as low paid workers in factories and offices, and of a new regime of female attractiveness which sexualised the female body while continuing to subordinate women to male definitions of desire. To put it more precisely the ‘sexual liberation’ of women was developing in a dual context: of male definitions of sexual need and pleasure, and of capitalist organisation of the labour market and of consumption. The junction of the two came through the material reality of family life. The economic position of most women — lower pay, fewer job opportunities — still ensures that marriage is seen as a gateway to financial as well as social security and position. And increasingly during this century sex, or at least sexual allure, has emerged as a guarantee for attaining status and security. We pay homage to an ideology of voluntarism in relation to marriage; the reality is often of an iron determinism, especially for women: economic, cultural, moral — and sexual. " [mijn nadruk] (26-27)

"It was not until the 1910s and 1920s that ‘sexologists’ expanded the concept of couple rapport to include sexual intimacy. The writings of such ‘experts’ as Havelock Ellis, Bertrand Russell, Marie Stopes, Van de Velde, Ben Lindsay and many others popularised the idea of a passionate union whose success could be judged largely by the degree of sexual harmony. By the outbreak of the Second World War this was already a dominant model in the United States, and by the early 1950s the idea of the ‘democratic’ family was widespread in Britain. Today the primarily sexual nature of conjugality seems to be universally accepted, whatever the reality."(27)

[Waarom het woord experts tussen die denigrerende aanhalingstekens? Wat is er mis met een opvatting die zegt dat een prettige relatie / huwelijk tussen mensen ook te maken heeft met wat er op seksueel vlak gebeurt? Waarom zoeken mensen relaties? Waarom worden relaties als iets anders gezien dan vriendschappen - dat heeft toch alles met seks te maken? Natuurlijk kunnen bevriende mensen samenwonen, samen slapen. Maar zonder seks ontbreekt er toch een dimensie die we aan intieme relaties toeschrijven?]

"Marriage carries with it high ideological burdens, not least of which is the burden of sexual skill. Most people seem willing to bear it. There have been shifts. In her investigation of late 1970s marriage-advice books Ellen Ross found an overwhelming emphasis on the importance of the heterosexual couple. As divorce rates rise, fertility declines, and the distinction between married and unmarried tends to blur, ‘the couple’ rather than marriage emerges as the one seeming constant of western life. But sex becomes even more central to its success." [mijn nadruk] (28)

"The problem is that sexual ties are notoriously fragile."(28)

[Dat is opnieuw een bewering waarvan ik me afvraag hoe waar die is.]

The regulation of sexuality

"Countries like Holland, West Germany, Sweden and Denmark saw a number of successful attempts to liberalise the laws governing homosexuality, abortion and pornography. Britain (or rather England and Wales) in the 1960s had an impressive set of legal changes, the most significant since the 1880s, justified by a coherent legal and political position — the ‘Wolfenden strategy’. The changes in these countries represented a clear shift from laws rooted in religious moralism or even deriving from ecclesiastical precedents, to new forms of regulation dependent upon more utilitarian calculations. The secularisation of the law was perhaps the most significant feature." [mijn nadruk] (29)

[Maar die veranderingen in wetgeving gingen lang niet zo ver als veel aanhangers van 'seksuele bevrijding' wilden. En bovendien is veel weer op een bepaalde manier teruggedraaid.]

Social antagonisms and political movements

"This broadening of the political process began amongst progressives and the general alignment was firmly with the radical left. The new sexual movements were, however, clearly attempting to expand the definition of politics against two forces at once; firstly, of course, against the upholders of sexual authoritarianism, whether political or religious; but secondly, against an older progressive tradition which gave priority to largely economic and class issues. At stake was not the relevance of those conventional struggles; but the equal relevance, to those engaged in them [feministes, mensen van kleur, lhbt*-mensen], of the new agenda. The political paradox of the late 1970s and early 1980s is that it has been the traditional moralists — or at least their latter-day progeny — who have recognised the opportunity provided by the new political complexity and the growth of sexual politics; and the old left which has signally failed to respond to the new politics. Increasingly, therefore, the contemporary political agenda on sexual issues is being written not by the libertarian left but by the moral right." [mijn nadruk] (32)

[Ik begrijp niet waar die conclusie vandaan komt. Het eerste deel klopt. Maar het tweede deel? Feministes enz. horen bij de 'moral right'? Vreemd. Al is bekend dat ze op dat vlak wel eens de verkeerde keuzes maakten, zo algemeen is dat toch niet?]

Chapter 3 - The new moralism

Over rechts in de VS.

"Two elements have been absolutely central in building mass support for this position: a constituency of embattled Christians, and a constituency of largely middle class, morally concerned women (not that the two are exclusive). The unifying motif was defence of ‘the family’, a metaphor as powerful as that of ‘permissiveness’ (and its polar opposite) to condense a number of hopes and fears, anxieties and possibilities around the social and the sexual. In the United States, much more than in Britain, this combination tapped a huge reservoir of strong moral belief" [mijn nadruk] (34)

"Religion has been vitally important in the articulation of moral positions and the regulation of sexual practices. Just as the move towards a more liberal interpretation of religious attitudes in the more influential British churches was a decisive precondition for the sex reforms of the 1960s, so opposition to the effects of these reforms was, contrariwise, predicated upon a largely religious world outlook." [mijn nadruk] (35)

[Allemaal bekend. Waar gaat dit naar toe? ]

"For many fundamentalist Christians the family and religion were intimately interwoven. Religion — and especially the authority of the Bible — provided a cement for personal relations and a resolution of a sense of social displacement. The family, on the other hand, was often the basis of the local religious grouping and certainly the fundamentalist churches saw themselves as extensions of kin — in rhetoric and organisation. For these and for many others ‘the family’ represented an image of certainty, stability and social position, whose foundations had nevertheless been fundamentally undermined. " [mijn nadruk] (36)

"Women have been active, especially at local level, in all the major single-issue campaigns that have fed the currents of the moral Right, from groupings such as Phyllis Schlafly’s campaign against ERA, and the ‘pro-life’, anti-abortion campaigns in America to Mary Whitehouse’s campaign to ‘clean up television’ in Britain. In both countries this female constituency seems largely to be made up of economically dependent, middle-aged, middle-class, deeply religious women, living in rural areas and on the fringes of large cities, offering a classic sociological fit between social location and the retention of religious belief."(36)

"The bitter anti-feminism of many women can be traced in part to the threat that the feminist break with traditional domestic forms seems to represent in sexual terms. Right-wing women live in the same world as feminist women, and experience the same threats (of male sexual violence) and the same possibilities of sexual objectification. In the case of right-wing women this is not countered by any sense of feminist solidarity though other forms of female community may be asserted. On the contrary feminism may be seen as precisely a force that is undermining women’s basic hold on social, economic and sexual stability — marriage, family life and protection by men. In a culture where it is still relatively difficult for many women to become economically independent, and where status depends on the position of the male, women may see their very survival as dependent upon family life."(37)

[Vrouwen die bescherming zoeken bij mannen en daarmee die mannen ondersteunen ... Achter elke vreselijke man staat een ondersteunende vrouw ... Nee, dan houd je niet van feminisme. ]

"The experience of conservative governments in the United States and Britain which were elected with New Right support suggests that there is no automatic relationship between popular constituency and legislative action. But what has been clearly demonstrated is the potentially political nature of sexual issues. (...) The real triumph of the right has been its recognition that ideological interventions on traditionally personal or private issues can capture significant support for a wide-ranging social and political agenda. It can constitute and unify political forces on the right in a way that older conservative interventions were unable to do. "(38)

"Moreover, two distinct political priorities have emerged: the one stressing economic liberalism, the other social and moral order. The two strands are not necessarily incompatible." [mijn nadruk] (39)

[Nee, echt? ]

"The complex linkages between white racism and fear of black sexuality have long been a subject of controversy. In the rhetorical evocation of the family by the New Right we can find an intricate marriage of race, gender, sex and class, in which all but the ‘traditional values’ are denigrated and devalued, and which effectively construct a white, largely male and middle-class view of what constitutes appropriate sexual behaviour. The campaigns against feminism or permissiveness thus have more than a negative agenda. They have a vision of a new order. In the homely rhetoric of the pro-family coalition lies the promise — or threat — of a new absolutism, an authoritarian populist project which nudges us gently to what has been called an ‘apple-pie authoritarianism’ in the United States, and which in Britain urges a return to the security of ‘Victorian values’." [mijn nadruk] (41)

"By a skilful theoretical manoeuvre, the feminist case against male violence is turned into a defence of conservative social forms. "(42)

[Jawel, maar dat maakt links niet aansprakelijk voor die retorische truuks. Eindelijk komt Weeks nu ook met kritiek op die nadruk op het gezin en zo.]

"The victims of this effort are all those who live outside the family form — and who are likely to continue to do so: the single person, the divorced, the unattached parent, the independent old, the collective-household dweller, the lesbian, the male gay. Few would argue against the nuclear unit as one road of choice. A strong case can be made against elevating the family into the fundamental norm of our variegated society." [mijn nadruk] (42)

[Een open deur toch wel. Moeten we het daar nu nog steeds over hebben?]

"In the New Right vision of social order the family has a policing role. It ensures carefully demarcated spheres between men and women, adults and children. It regulates sexual relations and sexual knowledge. It enforces discipline and proper respect for authority. It is a harbour of moral responsibility and the work ethic. This is contrasted to the ostensible moral chaos that exists outside. Given this set of beliefs, it is not surprising that the New Right is so vehemently opposed to the sex radical movements."(43)

"The history of the last two hundred years or so has been punctuated by a series of panics around sexuality — over childhood sexuality, prostitution, homosexuality, public decency, venereal diseases, genital herpes, pornography — which have often grown out of or merged into a generalised social anxiety." [mijn nadruk] (44)

Die over AIDS is er ook een. Dat wordt verder uitgewerkt.

"What is so very striking about the moral panic around AIDS is that its victims are often being blamed for the illness. And as most people with AIDS to date (at least in Western industrial countries) have been male homosexuals, this must surely tell us something about the current sexual climate. "(45)

"The parallel that immediately comes to mind is with the association made in the nineteenth century between female prostitution and the incidence of venereal disease. One response in England in the 1860s was the passing of the Contagious Diseases Acts, which enforced compulsory inspections in certain garrison towns of women suspected of being carriers." [mijn nadruk] (49)

[Natuurlijk werd 'promiscuïteit' weer het etiket waarmee conservatieven om zich heen sloegen. Maar ook binnen de 'gay community' was er veel discussie over de leefstijl die veel homoseksuelen volgden.]

"Even more crucially, a large part of the male gay revolution of the 1970s lay in the celebration of the body. The ‘machoisation’ of the male gay world in those years was in part at least a product not of a simple aping of traditional male values but of an attempt to break away from the easy assumption that male homosexuality represented an effeminisation of men. It was a demonstration that you could be male and gay. The cultivation of the body beautiful was a vital part of that."(49-50)

[Ah, daar komt dat vandaan. Las er ooit over in de biografie van Oliver Sacks. Ik houd niet van die macho-benadering. Het is teveel gericht op uiterlijk en streeft voor mijn gevoel het verkeerde ideaal van mannelijkheid na. ]

"Historically, the Christian west has offered three conflicting strategies for the regulation and control of sexuality, which I shall call the absolutist, the liberal, and the libertarian approaches."(53)

Over die laatste:

"In its most characteristic form it speaks of a sexuality that has been denied, to the detriment of individual freedom and social health. Its naturalistic approach to sexuality mirrors that of the major tradition of sexual thought for the past century, but it has been given an intellectual cutting edge through the work of the left Freudians, Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse especially; and a social grounding and political coherence through the counter-culture of the 1960s and the sex radical movements of the 1970s. At the heart of this approach is the belief that sexual repression is essential to social oppression; and that the moment of sexual liberation should necessarily coincide with the moment of social revolution. It is a utopian and millenarian project, and that has been its major source of energy. Rejecting the narrow certainties of conservative absolutism and the cautious and subtle distinctions of liberalism, it has offered a critique of contemporary sexual chaos from the viewpoint of an unalienated sexuality in the future. Its weakness is that, like the other approaches, it relies entirely on a fundamentalist view of sexuality whose truth it seeks to express. As a result its celebration of sex can easily become a glorification of all manifestations of desire. The effect of this, as feminists have pointed out, can be to impose a view that sexual expression is not only pleasurable, but necessary — often at the expense of women. The real problems, of defining alternatives and constructing new forms of relating, are ignored. The difficulty, and the danger, of simple libertarianism is that unfortunately sex does not unproblematically speak its own truth." [mijn nadruk] (55-56)

[Ik begrijp die kritiek weer niet. Alsof het alleen mannen zijn die dit willen. Alsof vrouwen niet hetzelfde kunnen willen. Dan vul je het toch in op een manier die niet ten koste gaat van vrouwen? Ik zie niet waarom er dan een vierde vorm moet komen die Weeks 'radicaal pluralisme' noemt.]

(59) Part Two - The sexual tradition

(61) Chapter 4 - ‘Nature had nothing to do with it’: the role of sexology

[De 'natuur' wordt al eeuwen gebruikt om van alles aan menselijke keuzes te rechtvaardigen. Ik ben dat met Weeks eens. Maar vaak is het de cultuur die bepalend is, niet de natuur. Desondanks is er een biologische basis in al het menselijke handelen. Ik hoop dat Weeks de juiste balans weet te verdedigen en niet doorslaat in 'niets is natuur, alles is cultuur' of vervalt in het postmodern ontkennen van enige universele waarheid.]

"What if, as now seems very likely, it is this constant seeking for truth that is the problem? We would be forced then, to look again at the role and function of those earnest proclaimers of the truth of sexuality, those would-be scientists of desire, the sexologists and their camp followers." [mijn nadruk] (62)

[Zo negatief steeds, Weeks over sexuologie. Niet het zoeken naar de waarheid is immers het probleem, maar menen die waarheid te vinden in de natuur is meestal het probleem. Dit klinkt dus erg postmodern.]

"‘King Sex’ has reigned over the twentieth century: Krafft-Ebing and Alfred Kinsey have been two of his most famous and assiduous courtiers. The question that inevitably arises is: how important were these writers and researchers, this apostolic succession from Krafft-Ebing to Masters and Johnson, from Havelock Ellis and Freud to Kinsey and beyond, in shaping the way we think — and hence experience — our sexualities? (...) These self-proclaimed pioneers, those avatars of sexual enlightenment, worked to build a science of desire, a new continent of knowledge that would reveal the hidden keys to our nature. In so doing they also lent support to other, more dubious activities, from the pathologising of ‘perverse’ sexual practices to the construction of racist eugenics, from the celebration of sexual antagonisms to the institutionalisation of dubious ‘treatments’. They contributed, in diverse ways in the twentieth century, to the shaping and maintenance of an elaborate technology of control. The more we delve into this complex, sometimes noble, sometimes murky, history, the more we can perceive that ‘Nature’, pure human nature, had very little to do with it." [mijn nadruk] (63)

"Just as the founding moment of sociology in this very period sought, through the writings of Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and many others, to find the ‘laws of society’, so, in a complementary and equally influential fashion, the early sexual theorists attempted to uncover the silent whisperings, the hidden imperatives, of our animal nature — ‘on account of its...deep influence upon the common weal’."(64)

[En wat is daar mis mee? Ik vraag me ook af of een uitdrukking als 'menselijke natuur' hier zo biologisch opgevat moet worden als Weeks doet. ]

"Twentieth-century sexologists, from Ellis to Kinsey, were rightly to stress the formative role of Christian categories in shaping our response to the body."(65)

[Dat is dan toch positief, zou ik zeggen. Veroordeelden ze het ook?]

"What was, however, new to the nineteenth century was the sustained effort to put all this on to a new, ‘scientific’ footing: to isolate, and individualise, the specific characteristics of sexuality, to detail its normal paths and morbid variations, to emphasise its power and to speculate on its effects."(65-66)

[Waarom dat 'wetenschappelijk' tussen aanhalingstekens? Laat dan gewoon zien wat wetenschap is, waarom het niet wetenschappelijk was, waar waarden en normen een rol speelden, en zo verder. Als het de seksuologen waren die in de 19e eeuw meenden wetenschappelijk aan te kunnen tonen dat masturberen desastreuze gevolgen had voor je lichaam en geest, dan toon je toch aan dat het meeste van die opvattingen nergens anders op gebaseerd was dan op meningen en overtuigingen? Ik begrijp het gemekker niet. Ook tegenwoordig worden allerlei beweringen gedaan die zogenaamd 'wetenschappelijk' zijn, maar al gauw door de mand vallen.]

"But the aspiration to fully scientific status gave the embryonic sexology a prestige — and more important, a new object of concern and intervention in the instinct and its vicissitudes — that has carried its influence, definitions, classifications and norms into the twentieth century. "(66)

De focus verschoof naar de seksualiteit van het individu.

"The decisive stage was the individualising of sex, the search for the primeval urge in the subject itself. Already by the 1840s Henricus Kaan was writing (in Latin) about the modifications of the ‘nisus sexualis’ (the sexual instinct) in individuals, and other formative works followed: on the presence and dangers of childhood sexuality, the sexual aetiology of hysteria and on the sexual aberrations. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895), himself homosexually inclined, published twelve volumes on homosexuality (given its name by Benkert in 1869) between 1864 and 1879, an achievement that was greatly to influence Carl Westphal’s ‘discovery’ of the ‘contrary sexual impulse’ by 1870, and Krafft-Ebing’s wider speculations on sexual aberrations thereafter." [mijn nadruk] (66)

De invloed van het biologische 'framework' van Darwin's evolutietheorie was immens. Dat was de eerste beslissende factor die de benadering van seksuologen in de richting van 'de natuur' trokken.

"Biology became the avenue into the mysteries of Nature, and its findings were legitimised by the evidence of natural history. What existed ‘in Nature’ provided evidence for what was human.
The second decisive moment was the appearance of Psychopathia Sexualis [van Krafft-Ebing]: it was the eruption into print of the speaking pervert, the individual marked, or marred, by his (or her) sexual impulses. The case studies were a model of what was to follow, the analyses were the rehearsal for a century of theorising. " [mijn nadruk] (67)

[Ik denk dat ik snap wat Weeks bedoelt: er werd geschreven in termen van 'drift' en 'instinct' en 'impuls', van biologie en fysiologie. Je ziet dat bij Freud ook. Je kijkt dan naar mensen, praat over mensen alsof ze dieren zijn die in hun gedrag gedetermineerd worden door biologische etc. oorzaken en zelf geen enkele keuze hebben. Natuurlijk hebben die mensen dan anderen nodig die hen kunnen helpen in hun 'afwijkingen van normaal seksueel gedrag' (psychiaters en andere medici, therapeuten, rechterlijke macht), hun gedrag kunnen 'bijstellen' met allerlei ingrepen (somatisch, therapeutisch, veroordeling en opsluiting), en zo verder. En uiteraard wordt daarbij niet meer gekeken naar de sociaal-culturele en normatieve aspecten rondom seksueel gedrag. Het is de hekel die ik zelf bijvoorbeeld heb aan evolutionaire psychologie waarin gedrag ook de hele tijd teruggevoerd wordt op biologische aspecten. Maar dan nog geldt: er is invloed vanuit de biologie op seksueel gedrag. En er waren positieve aspecten aan dat er eindelijk min of meer openlijk over seksueel gedrag gesproken werd.]

"In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, published in 1905, and itself a major stimulus to the growth of sexual theory, Freud acknowledged the contribution of nine writers: Krafft-Ebing, Albert Moll, P.J.Möbius, Havelock Ellis, Albert Schrenck-Notzing, Leopold Lowenfeld, Albert Eulenburg, Iwan Bloch, and Magnus Hirschfeld. To these could be added a host of other names, from J.L.Casper and J.J.Moreau, to Cesare Lombroso and August Forel, to Valentin Magnan and Benjamin Tarnorwsky, names scarcely remembered today, some even mercifully forgotten during their lifetimes, but significant shapers of the modern discourse of sexology.
Central to their work was the notion that underlying the diversity of individual experiences and social effects was a complex natural process which needed to be understood in all its forms." [mijn nadruk] (67-68)

Alle vormen van seksueel gedrag werden beschreven en geclassificeerd.

"Secondly, this concentration on the ‘perverse’, the ‘abnormal’, threw light on the ‘normal’, discreetly shrouded in respectable ideology but scientifically reaffirmed in clinical text-books."(68)

"Sexology came to mean therefore both the study of the sexual impulse and of relations between the sexes, for ultimately they were seen as the same: sex, gender, sexuality were locked together as the biological imperative."(69)

"They sundered, as Krafft-Ebing put it in the Preface to Psychopathia Sexualis, the ‘conspiracy of silence’ on sex in the nineteenth century. They saw themselves as in the vanguard of the struggle for modernity, and in this two strands were interwoven: their commitment to the protocols of science; and their devotion to the sexual enlightenment of the twentieth century. "(69)

[En dat met alle arrogantie van de wereldverbeteraar, zoals ik zelf bij Freud heb kunnen waarnemen. Maar de kernvraag blijft hoe wetenschappelijk al hun werk nu werkelijk was. Freud vond zichzelf helemaal toegewijd aan de wetenschap, maar dat is in ieder geval niet wat wij vandaag de dag wetenschap noemen.]

"Whatever their literary merits, these ambitiously scientific efforts simultaneously had a social and political purpose: to bring sexual enlightenment to a variety of social practices."(70)

Waaronder wetgeving en rechtspraak.

"Most of these early writers on sexuality endorsed the removal of penal laws against homosexuality — from Lombroso in Italy, to Ellis in England, Hirschfeld in Germany, Krafft-Ebing and Freud in Austria — because they conflicted with the insights of the new sexual science. They embraced a form of political rationalism, for, as Krafft-Ebing put it, ‘erroneous ideas’ prevail."(71)

[Veel sexuologen zaten in hervormingsbewegingen en zo. Dat lijkt positief, omdat het in lijn is met wat we vandaag de dag in het algemeen van die kwesties als homoseksualiteit vinden. Maar natuurlijk: wat als die 'wetenschappelijke inzichten' gezegd zouden hebben dat homoseksualiteit verkeerd is en verboden zou moeten worden?]

"Sexual science was to be the handmaiden of sexual reform, the harbinger of a new sexual order built on a rational understanding of our true sexual nature. The fact that they frequently disagreed on the empirical evidence, the theoretical underpinnings and the social implications of their science scarcely mattered. Their commitment was absolute. Krafft-Ebing representatively hoped that his work might ‘prove of utility in the service of science, justice and humanity’. So said all of them. "(72)

"What remains of this aspiration is more contentious. In recent years a serried army of protesters have advanced on the structures that the pioneering sexual theorists so assiduously constructed. Historians have challenged their claims to modernity. Philosophers of science have queried their scientificity. Feminists have attacked their patriarchal values. Homosexuals have resisted their medicalising and pathologising tendencies. The walls of the citadel are still standing; but their foundations are beginning to crumble under the challenge. (...) Such doubts must be redoubled when we approach the inexact human sciences, and the even less precise domain of sex. The object of sexological study is notoriously shifting and unstable, and sexology is bound, by countless delicate strands, to the preoccupations of its age. It is impossible to understand the impact of sexology if we simply accept its own evaluation of its history. Sexology emerged from, and contributed to, a dense web of social practices. This should propel us at least to look again at its claims to enlightenment, and scientific neutrality. " [mijn nadruk] (72)

"Sexology did not appear spontaneously at the end of the nineteenth century. It was constructed upon a host of pre-existing writings and social endeavours. This alone must force us to reconsider at least some of its claim to oppositional status. In many ways, far from being at odds with nineteenth-century trends it was peculiarly complicit with them. As much recent historical work has shown, our image of the nineteenth century as a uniquely sexually repressive period must be challenged."(73)

[Wat betreft de eerste drie zinnen: dit klopt voor Freud helemaal, bijvoorbeeld. Zie ook Ellenberger die al die achtergronden schetst. Ook de waardering van allerlei seksuele verschijnselen was niet veel anders. Over de laatste zin heb ik echter mijn twijfels. 'Alleen maar repressief' misschien niet, maar wel in grote lijnen. Wat maakt het in de praktijk dan uit?]

"What we see in the nineteenth century is a ‘grappling for control’ in the light of rapidly changing social and economic conditions. All these produced major shifts in relations between the genders, and in the relationship between behaviour and moral codes. Sexuality becomes a symbolic battleground both because it was the focus of many of these changes, and because it was a surrogate medium through which other intractable battles could be fought. Anxieties produced in the bourgeois mind through large gatherings of workers, men and women, in factories, could be emotionally discharged through a campaign to moralise the female operatives, and exclude them from the factories. Worries over housing and overcrowding might be lanced through campaigns about the threat of incest. Fear of imperial decay could be allayed by moralising campaigns against prostitution, the supposed festering carrier of venereal infection, and hence of the weakening of the health of soldiers. Concern with the nature of childhood could be re-directed through a new preoccupation with masturbation and sex segregation in schools and dormitories. A fear of the effects of feminism in relations between the sexes could be channelled into social purity crusades to expunge immorality. In a significant array of social practices the sexual is discovered as a key to the social. Through these concerns, worries, campaigns (and the resistances they evoked), sexuality is being constituted as a key area of social relations. Far from being the area most resistant to the operations of power, it is the medium most susceptible to the various struggles for power. Sexology emerges out of these struggles and social practices; it begins the task of analysing them, codifying them, and hence constituting on a theoretical level what is already emerging on the level of social practice as a unified domain of sexuality, sexuality as an autonomous force and realm." [mijn nadruk] (74-75)

"It is also significant that sexology emerges, in the 1880s and 1890s, at the very period when in countries like Germany, Britain and the United States a social purity consensus achieves a precarious dominance, reflected in a consolidation of legal codes, a refined concern with private morality as opposed to public vice, a desire to reform and remoralise the public domain through campaigns against alcohol and prostitution, and when imperialist rivalries are giving rise to a new preoccupation with race and reproduction. Sexology, like the sex reform movements which in many ways parallel it, develops not against a pre-existing monolithism of sexual repression, but alongside an emergent social hygiene and moral reform hegemony with which in many ways sexology and sex reform are implicated. " [mijn nadruk] (75-76)

"There was no clear-cut divide between the eugenicist, the social moralist and the reforming sexual theorist: they inhabited the same world of values and concepts."(76)

"It is clear from this that sexology to a large extent moved with, not against, the grain of nineteenth-century preoccupations. The question that arises is why then the early sexologists saw themselves as so embattled, so much in the vanguard of progress? We must be careful here to distinguish on what terms the sexological writings were accepted."(76)

[Misschien had dat te maken met de moeilijkheden die sommigen in sommige landen hadden om hun werk over seksuele kwesties gepubliceerd te krijgen, zoals Weeks uitlegt. Dat kan je een soort van pioniersgevoel geven. Zolang medici voor medici schreven mocht er veel, maar boeken in gewone toegankelijke taal voor het grote publiek vielen vaak onder de censuur, in het ene land meer dan in het andere.]

"In brief, the findings of sex research and theorising have been allowable when they have been compatible with an acceptable discourse, usually that of medicine. When sexual theorists were, on the other hand, explicitly political in their commitments they became vulnerable to challenge and attack. They were especially vulnerable when they took the side of sexual deviants." [mijn nadruk] (78)

"It was through its symbiosis with the medical profession that sexology became respectable. It was indeed the new ‘medical gaze’ of the nineteenth century, the new concept of a systematic exploration and understanding of the body, that also, in a very important sense, made sexology possible by reshaping the questions that could be asked about the human (sexed) body and its internal processes. But the other side of this was that sexological insight could easily become subordinated to a medical norm. Many commentators in the nineteenth century, especially feminists, were noting the elevation of the medical profession into a new priestly caste, as the profession itself sought to consolidate itself, and as its principles and practices were utilised in social intervention, especially in relation to women. At best doctors, with few exceptions, generally acquiesced in stereotyped ideas of womanhood even if they were not militant in shaping them. At worst doctors intervened to actually shape female sexuality, through case work, organising against women’s access to higher education because of their incapacity for intellectual work, supporting new forms of legal intervention and evidence, campaigning against abortion and birth control. Commentators observed that nineteenth-century medicine created women as no more than wombs on legs, as little more than the mechanism by which life was transmitted. Ellis’s comment that women’s brains were in some sense ‘in their wombs’ or Otto Weininger’s that ‘Man possesses sexual organs; her sexual organs possess women’ called upon, reaffirmed, and recirculated such assumptions of medical discourse.

Early sexology, then, drew much of its claim to legitimacy from its association with more acceptable institutions of power, especially medicine and the law, and this is a tendency that has continued. Sex research, Plummer has observed, makes its practitioners (even in the 1980s) ‘morally suspect’, and in the rush to protect themselves many sexologists have become little more than propagandists of the sexual norm, whatever it is at any particular time. The call upon science then becomes little more than a gesture to legitimise interventions governed largely by specific relations of power. The production in sexological discourse of a body of knowledge that is apparently scientifically neutral (about women, about sexual variants, delinquents or offenders) can become a resource for utilisation in the production of normative definitions that limit and demarcate erotic behaviour. By the 1920s the traditional social purity organisations, deeply rooted as they were in evangelical Christian traditions, were prepared to embrace a cocktail of insights from Ellis and Freud. Today the moral right finds it opportune to legitimise its purity crusades by reference to (selected) sexological findings. Sexology has never been straightforwardly outside or against relations of power; it has frequently been deeply implicated in them." [mijn nadruk] (78-79)

[Ja, snap ik helemaal, dat bevooroordeelde normatieve kader van medici. Ik begin te begrijpen waar Weeks zit in zijn opvattingen over seksuologie.]

"And stemming from this their achievement has been to naturalise sexual patterns and identities and thus obscure their historical genealogy. The results have been profound in shaping our concepts of sex and sexual subjectivities.
There are three closely related areas where the power to naturalise has been particularly strong: in relation to the characteristics of sex itself, in the theoretical and social privileging of heterosexuality, and in the description and categorisation of sexual variations, particularly homosexuality. I want to look at each of these in turn." [mijn nadruk] (80)

"We perceive what has been called a ‘basic biological mandate’, a powerful energy that presses on, and so must be controlled by the cultural matrix. Sex is a force outside, and set against society. It is part of the eternal battle of individual and society."(81)

[Een heel traditioneel idee en dan nog vooral als geldend gezien voor mannen. De metaforen zijn typisch masculien: een dam die dreigt te breken, een vulkaan die dreigt uit te barsten, en zo verder. Vrouwen hadden die innerlijke drang / dat instinct / die impuls / die drift zogenaamd niet of heel wat minder. Binnen het kader van seks als voortplanting hadden zij wel een moederinstinct. Typisch. ]

"At the level of the cell, maleness was characterised by the tendency to dissipate energy (katabolic) and femaleness by the tendency to store up energy (anabolic). By making sperm and ovum exhibit the qualities of katabolism and anabolism Geddes and Thomson were able to deduce a dichotomy between the sexes which, like Spencer’s, could easily be assimilated to the conventional ideal of male rationality and female intuition, and which, laid down in nature, could not easily be overridden."(84)

"This in turn provides the basis for definitions of normality and abnormality. To be a normal man is to be heterosexual (attracted to the opposite sex); to be a normal woman is to be a welcoming recipient of male wooing. Gender-appropriate behaviour is being defined in relation to appropriate sexual practices. This may seem so basically obvious as not to merit comment. But these sharp demarcations are, I would suggest, historical, not natural phenomena." [mijn nadruk] (86)

"Many attacks on nineteenth-century feminists were precisely because they threatened to blur the distinctions between the sexes, and it is certainly the case that much sexological literature is a direct response to the changing position of women. Freud’s plaintive question, ‘What does woman want?’, was not uniquely his. It is the common note of the Founding Fathers.
But this accentuation of sexual difference was not solely a response to women; others have noticed how important distinctions and dualities generally became in the definition of the sexual (or of other areas of the social) in the nineteenth century: vice/virtue, hygiene/disease, morality/depravity, civilisation/animality, nature/culture, mind/bodies, reason/ instinct, responsibility/non-responsibility. Each of these distinctions had its own separate history, feeding into the developing definitions of sexuality: women were closer to morality and animality, to body and instinct, to nature and non-responsibility. Men to the opposite. These become the basis for sharp divisions, contradictions, opposites."(87)

[Precies, en van die rolverdeling hebben we nog steeds enorme last.]

"From the denials of the existence of female sexuality of a William Acton (which Ellis acknowledged to be peculiar to the nineteenth century) to the glorification of female sexual potential in the writings of Masters and Johnson, the feminine has been defined by male experts."(88)

"The definitions [van de seksuologen - GdG], of course, had powerful effects. They led, as Katz has graphically suggested, to the ‘medical colonisation’ of a people. They set the limits beyond which in this century it has been very difficult to think. The homosexual identities, gay male and lesbian, have been established within the parameters of sexological definition. But they have been established by living and breathing men and women, not by paper caricatures floating from the pens of the sexologists.
This is the real point. Sexology, in association with the law, medicine and psychiatry, might construct the definitions. But those thus defined have not passively accepted them. On the contrary, there is powerful evidence that the sexual subjects have taken and used the definitions for their own purposes. (...) More important, the anonymous people whose sexual feelings were denied or defined out of existence were able to use sexological descriptions to achieve a sense of self, even of affirmation." [mijn nadruk] (94)

[Ja, definities zijn krachtiger dan we vaak denken. Ze worden gebruikt om mensen in te delen op een manier zoals voorheen niet gebeurde, ze worden gebruikt om mensen te veroordelen. Maar ze kunnen ook gebruikt worden om een identititeit te ontwikkelen. Dus die definities zijn niet alleen maar kommer en kwel.]

"For what sexology did was indeed to propose restrictive definitions, and to be regularly at one with the controlling ambition of a variety of social practices; but it also put into language a host of definitions and meanings which could be played with, challenged, negated, and used. Against its intentions usually, countering its expectations often, sexology did contribute to the self-definition of those subjected to its power of definition."(95)

"This suggests that the forces of regulation and control are never unified in their operations, nor singular in their impact. We are subjected to a variety of restrictive definitions, but this very variety opens the possibility of resistance and change.
The emergence of modern feminism and gay politics, often on the very terrain marked out by sexology, points to the truth of this. Sexology as the domain of ‘the expert’ on sex, is being challenged by the very sexual subjects whose identities it helped to define."(95)

(96) Chapter 5 - ‘A never-ceasing duel’? ‘Sex’ in relation to ‘society’

De verhouding van de historische, biologische, psychologische en sociologische aspecten van seksualiteit is notoir ingewikkeld. Met zo'n uitdrukking als 'seks en de maatschappij' halen we dus een hoop problemen in huis.

"Within the general formulation ‘sex’ versus ‘society’ two responses have been possible — what we can best term the ‘repression model’ and the ‘liberatory model’." [mijn nadruk] (98)

"From Rousseau to the pioneers of sexology, from Freud to Kinsey and beyond, other cultures have provided a test-bed and a comparative standard for speculations about the nature of sex and the reasons for its variations. In the debates amongst anthropologists we may, therefore, find critical insights into the difficulties of social explanations of sex. " [mijn nadruk] (99)

Het evolutionaire model bestond van 1860 tot 1920 (primitieve samenlevingen die we achtergelaten hadden).

"A single line of progress to modernity was proposed, though what evolution was built on, or had triumphed over (primitive promiscuity and matriarchy or natural monogamy and patriarchy) was disputed."(100)

"But while never fully abandoning an evolutionary perspective Malinowski was to become the leading proponent of an alternative anthropological model: one which saw in different cultures evidence not for our own forefathers’ behaviour but for the variety of social developments in which questions of the origins of behaviour were suspended. This relativist model posed in a new way the question of the relationship of the sexual and the social, this time privileging the cultural over the natural, for the co-existence of different types of society suggested that what was crucial was not natural but social differences built on a basic human nature. " [mijn nadruk]

"This led, secondly, to the abandonment of speculative evolutionary or historical approaches in favour of ethnography, of empirical field work, of immersing oneself in a culture to imbibe all its inner meanings, subtle nuances and self-appraisals."(101)

"The curious effect of this privileging of culture in such a static and ahistorical way is that it does not challenge the status of the natural. The simultaneous recognition of cultural variations and the refusal to speculate on origins or development co-exists with a model of biological and psychological human needs as formed in the natural family." [mijn nadruk] (101)

Iemand als Malinowski zoekt in feite naar universalia waarbij hij kritiekloos uitgaat van vanzelfsprekendheden.

"For Malinowski, as Kuper has noted, ‘cultures were delicately attuned mechanisms for the satisfaction of men’s needs.’ The problem was that these assumed needs were based on a model of instincts, derived from contemporary theory, which were never questioned. The result is that Malinowski reads into nature patterns of behaviour — monogamy, jealousy, the primacy of genital sexuality, and the inevitability of heterosexual pair bonding — which need to be explained rather than taken as given. Malinowski, for instance, recognises the existence of infantile sexuality, but evaluates it solely in terms of its relationship to adult genital sexuality, as a form of playing at genitality." [mijn nadruk] (102-103)

"American culturalism was a conscious reaction to the racial and racist fantasies of eugenics, which in the United States and Britain as elsewhere was enormously influential in extinguishing the liberal emphasis on general social ameliorisation in favour of proposals for the planned breeding of the best. Both ‘negative eugenics’, the elimination of the unfit, and ‘positive eugenics’, the promotion of breeding in the best, claimed that the future of the race lay with selective propagation."(104)

"The romantic vision that Mead constructed was no doubt influenced by the long tradition of romanticising primitive cultures, serving subliminally, perhaps, to suggest yet again that primitives are closer to nature, and hence more joyously sexual. But it seemed a death blow to the biologisms of her predecessors, a definitive proof for her contemporaries of the ‘unbelievably malleable’ nature of human nature. " [mijn nadruk] (105)

"But to concentrate on Mead’s errors is to ignore the important contribution she made to the discussion of sex. By describing in a vivid way the different attitudes towards sex and gender behaviour in other cultures, she helped put on the agenda the question of why western cultures are as they are. Unlike the early anthropologists she refused to see contemporary mores as an evolutionary necessity which transcended primitive ones; and unlike Malinowski she did not seek, though she may at times have assumed, cross-cultural evidence for common human characteristics. Her task was to throw into relief received beliefs, and this has been of major significance in thinking about sexuality. " [mijn nadruk] (105)

"For Mead no less than Malinowski is committed in the end to a taken-for-granted notion of the biological family as the basic natural as well as social unit, in which a division of labour between men and women is necessary and inevitable. "(107)

Vervolgens gaat het over de sociobiologie, ook een deterministische benadering.

"This brings sociobiology surprisingly close at times to some of the writings of the social anthropologists. The fervent evangelical tone of sociobiology obscures its affinity to the Malinowskian desire to see every detail of human culture as a functional adaptation of the biological needs of the individual. But in sociobiology the anthropological concern with the forms of social regulation is displaced in favour of an intensified interest in the biological mechanisms that provide the bases of social phenomena. In doing this it offers more than an adjunct to the social sciences. It lays claim to displacing them. " [mijn nadruk] (108-109)

Invloed van onder andere de ethologie.

"Darwin, it could be said, had made possible a break with anthropocentrism, the belief that man was the measure of all existence, by placing humanity in an evolutionary process. Ethologists sought to go further, by breaking with anthropomorphism, the attribution to animals of human characteristics. By studying animals in their own terrain, they attempted to understand specifically animal behaviour. But the paradoxical result of this was an attempt, consequently, to understand the animal in man. "(110)

"These [boeken op dit terrein - GdG] had an enormous circulation (Morris’s The Naked Ape sold over 8 million copies world wide), largely because they offered simple or comprehensible answers to complex and intractable problems (sexual antagonism, ceaseless warfare, competition for scarce resources). Even some of the progenitors of this approach felt the popularisation went too far: Lorenz suggested that Morris may have exaggerated the beastliness of man. But they were important forerunners of the sociobiological school, for, as Wilson saw it, they helped to break the ‘stifling grip of the extreme behaviourists’." [mijn nadruk] (110-111)

"At the heart of sociobiological thinking about sex, then, is a basic acceptance of sexual division and antagonism, and conflicting interests, for, as H.J.Eysenck and Glenn Wilson have written, ‘Men and women are fundamentally (i.e. psychologically and genetically) different in their sexual, as well as in their social attitudes and behaviour.’ These differences, Steven Goldberg has suggested, have set ‘immutable limits... on institutional possibility’. E.O.Wilson himself has tempered such views by suggesting that differences between the sexes are but cultural variations on a twig only slightly bent at birth. But he goes on to suggest that the most socially useful thing to do is not to eliminate differences, any more than one should exaggerate them, but provide equal opportunity for each sex in his/her sphere. This is the least costly of choices, and it helps preserve the nuclear family, ‘the building block of nearly all human societies’. By a familiar slide, relations between the sexes are seen as problematic and troublesome, but necessary and complementary. So a ‘cosmic conservatism’ is re-established even as the way is opened to the consideration of alternatives. " [mijn nadruk] (113-114)

"These differences begin and end, it sometimes seems, with the evolutionary characteristics of the ova and testes. Because males have an almost infinite number of sperm, while women have a very restricted supply of ova, it is suggested that men have an evolutionary propulsion towards spreading their seed to ensure diversity and reproductive success, and hence towards promiscuity, while women have an equal interest in reserving energy, towards conservation, and hence towards monogamy. From this can be deduced the explanation of all the other supposedly fundamental differences: greater intrasexual competition between men than between women, a greater male tendency towards polygamy and jealousy whereas women are ‘more malleable’ and amenable, and a greater sexual will and arousal potential in men than in women. " [mijn nadruk] (114)

[Ja, inderdaad, daar gaan we weer. Mannen en vrouwen zijn van nature ... en zo voort en zo verder.]

"There is a good deal of evidence for the separation between bodily and biochemical characteristics of the individual and gender and sexual identity. ‘Nature’ is less stern in creating sexual dimorphism than humans like to think. (...) Some homosexual men are promiscuous, others are not; some are aggressive, others are not; some are hyper-masculine in style and appearance, others are not; some are misogynistic, others are not. The easy generalisation to back up a theoretical point is a characteristic of sociobiological writings on sex, but hardly one to inspire confidence in its ‘scientific’ quality.
The theoretical inadequacies of sociobiology have been thoroughly rehearsed elsewhere. The most effective arguments come from the three disciplines of biology, social anthropology, and history." [mijn nadruk] (115)

"But despite these objections, powerful and valid as they undoubtedly are, sociobiology has been influential, in a variety of social and political discourses, and this demands some interrogation. Sociobiologists themselves disclaim any political project.(...)
One left response to this has been the suggestion that sociobiology is effective because it is simply a justification for the status quo, and Barash has agreed that ‘sociobiology reads very much like laissez-faire capitalism operative in the realm of genes’. Much of sociobiological terminology is derived from modern market and cybernetic systems, so the dynamic of human evolution is expressed in terms of genetic investment and accumulation and maximisation of genetic profit. The gene has all the apparel of the capitalist entrepreneur, and genetic determinism can easily be read as a justification for contemporary capitalist social relations.
But it would be limited to see sociobiology simply in these terms. Sociobiology has become popular in the last decade because it seems to explain the otherwise inexplicable, and because, as Joe Crocker has suggested, its explanations tally with people’s lived experiences under capitalism. Its theses correspond with common sense understandings of differences as inequalities; they draw on, and then lend theoretical sustenance to, elements which are common in the culture: about racial, gender, and intellectual differences. Sociobiology is influential and effective because of the paucity or ineffectiveness of alternative explanations." [mijn nadruk] (116-117)

"Biology becomes meaningful through culture; the meaning of culture should not be searched for in biology. The result of an over-insistence on biological limits is that politics becomes trapped within categorisations and divisions whose historical genealogies and effects are once again ignored. It prevents the asking of certain questions. The sociobiological response to contemporary feminism is a good illustration of this."(117-118)

"My purpose here is not to denigrate biological evidence. Any theory of sexuality will need recourse to an understanding of bodily possibilities and limits. But the disturbing thing about the revived search for biological explanations of social behaviour is that the urge to fill a conceptual gap is stronger than an adherence to theoretical consistency and political judgment. A good example of the seductive temptations of an ostentatiously biological explanation is the Kinsey Institute’s final publication on homosexuality, Sexual Preferences."(119)

"The overriding difficulty with all these theories is that they cannot function without some notion of ‘natural man’ (with woman as the natural other). With Malinowski and the sociobiologists this is explicit. But even when a liberal like Margaret Mead attempts to relativise social categories, she still assumes implicitly that there are previously ordered slots available for the roles and identities to fit into. The theoretical implications of this are important. But the political implications are even more significant, for if relations between the genders and the forms of sexual expression are in the last resort dictated by the laws of nature, by instinctual forces outside human control or by human needs practically outside human understanding, then forms of human action must be severely limited. It might be that this is the case, as sociobiologists in particular have proposed. There are, however alternative positions, which offer a more fruitful understanding of the social dynamics at work. " [mijn nadruk] (120)

Die zijn te vinden in de radicale sociologie, de structuralistische antropologie, de psychoanalyse en in Marxistische theorie waar men niet zo gelooft in universalia, de unieke persoon, het unieke subjectieve zelf, en zo verder.

"All societies, of course, have ways of specifying individuals, through names, position or status, but they are not necessarily specified as individual subjects, unique entities with a distinct consciousness of self, who have the will and power to constitute social order and make moral judgment. Other societies have conceived of individuals through the dense network of obligations, duties and responsibility they owe: as lords and masters, priests and laymen and so on. Since at least the seventeenth century, however (and many argue that it occurred much earlier), the west has prioritised individual will and responsibility as the starting point of speculations on society. ‘Man’ exists prior to society. ‘His’ activity with others founds society. ‘He’ is the measure of all things. "(121)

[De vraag is dan natuurlijk of die (over)waardering van het individu en individuele verantwoordelijkheid goed is of niet. Zoiets speelt bijvoorbeeld in de discussies over mensenrechten. Bv. ten aanzien van China waar het individu helemaal niet zo centraal staat, terwijl ze wel vanuit die maatstaf beoordeeld worden.]

"A rejection of the enticing model of the bourgeois individual in all ‘his’ world-making glory should not necessarily involve an abandonment of what we have come to regard as ‘humanist values’. Love, solidarity, trust, warmth are not inconsequential qualities; they are fundamental to the ‘good life’ on any interpretation. But it is dangerous to base these on a supposedly fixed, continuous and eternal, human nature. Human beings are shaped by a flow of different forces and influences, swayed by contradictory appeals. Unification into a fixed identity is a hazard-strewn process. Who is to say what elements will predominate in the fixing of our allegiances: gender, sexual preference, race, creed or class? We become human in culture and cultures vary and change. So do the political priorities we assign to our various needs and desires. " [mijn nadruk] (122)

"We can tentatively propose, however, that the body is a site for historical moulding and transformation because sex, far from being resistant to social ordering, seems peculiarly susceptible to it. We know that sex is a vehicle for the expression of a variety of social experiences: of morality, duty, work, habit, tension release, friendship, romance, love, protection, pleasure, utility, power, and sexual difference. Its very plasticity is the source of its historical significance. Sexual behaviour would transparently not be possible without physiological sources, but physiology does not supply motives, passion, object choice or identity. These come from ‘somewhere else’, the domains of social relations and psychic conflict. If this is correct the body can no longer be seen as a biological given which emits its own meaning. It must be understood instead as an ensemble of potentialities which are given meaning only in society.
To leave it at that, however, would be unsatisfactory. We are certainly creatures of naming, of designation and of categorisation. But these definitions are multiple ones — our sense of self is a precarious unity of different, often conflicting definitions and meanings: as male or female, heterosexual or homosexual, working class or aristocrat, housewife or worker, black or white. How do we recognise ourselves in these namings? Which is, or should be, the dominant one? What is the nature of this ‘desire’ which is involved in speaking of pleasure and the body? Is there an intermediary stage between the biological possibility and social coding? These happen to be the precise areas to which psychoanalysis has laid claim. So far I have deliberately deferred any detailed discussion of the Freudian tradition which haunted and taunted but still remained within the discourse of sexology. It is now appropriate to redress that omission: to explore the realm of the unconscious, and the challenge it poses to the orthodoxies of the sexual tradition. "(122-123)

[Jammer, die keuze voor de psychoanalyse. Hoe kun je Freud en de psychoanalyse en het 'onbewuste' nog serieus nemen vandaag de dag?]

(125) Part Three - The challenge of the unconscious

(127) Chapter 6 - Sexuality and the unconscious

"Freud’s work represents a high point of a would-be-scientific sexology — and a source of its potential distintegration."(127)

"If true (and I believe that despite its problems it is ‘truer’ than any alternative approach), Freud’s theory of the mind opens the way to a concept of sexuality and sexual difference which is alive to the body, aware of social relations, but sensitive to the importance of mental activities. "(128)

"It sometimes seems that there are as many Freuds as there are Freudians. Freud has become a resource from which we pick the bits we like and discard the rotten husks. I do not pretend here to recover or return to a ‘real’ Freud, nor at the other extreme do I want to embrace the whole of the legacy of psychoanalysis. But I am seeking in the theory of the unconscious insights which can challenge and disrupt the sexual tradition we have inherited. Buried in the corpus of Freud’s work are elements which should be central to a radical theory of sexuality. " [mijn nadruk] (128)

[Ja, allemaal slagen om de arm, maar intussen wel kiezen voor een vage verzameling opvattingen die immuun zijn voor kritiek. Ik snap de keuze voor de psychoanalyse echt niet, ik snap niet wat het moet oplossen voor Weeks. Hij noemt de verdringing in de kinderjaren, de relatie van taal en geest, dat het onbewuste talig zou zijn:]

"In this reading, the unconscious becomes the way in which we acquire the rules of culture through the acquisition of language. We become fully human through the entry into the order of language and meaning. Following the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, for whom meaning is constructed not through inherent qualities but through the arbitrary relationship of signs, Lacanian and much feminist psychoanalysis has gone on to stress that growing awareness of separation and difference is the key element in the acquisition of self and subjectivity." [mijn nadruk] (130)

[O, dus het non-verbale telt niet? de aanraking? de blik? Dat is nu precies wat er zo fout is aan heel die psychoanalyse, die overschatting van talige communicatie. Volgt een uitgebreide bespreking van Freud die me niet aanspreekt en niets oplost.]

"It is apparent that Freud was governed by a set of assumptions which shaped his analysis, the most fundamental of which was the inevitability of heterosexual desire; to him, at this stage, at least of his awareness of the problem of sexuality, it was inconceivable that Dora should not be attracted to Herr K. The second assumption was of his own neutrality in the situation, and his unawareness of his counter-transference. This blinded him to the possibility until too late that far from repressing her desire for Herr K, the source of Dora’s problem might be the repression of her desire for Frau K, and behind that her oedipal desire for her mother, who remains an absence in the text. Dora’s ultimate dismissal of Freud and abandonment of the analysis was a prototype of many feminists’ rejection of Freud. In the complex play of desire, psychoanalysis could hardly claim a neutrality which its own theory undermined." [mijn nadruk] (146)

[Ja, dat kun je wel zeggen. Zo waar een kritische toon?]

"The difficulty with Freud (especially for someone who wants to use his critical insights) was that in the end he did believe that a heterosexual genital organisation of sexuality was a cultural necessity, so that although he could readily concede that all of us have ‘seeds’ of perversion, a healthy development demanded their subordination to the norm. Freud certainly knew that norms could be changed. But he also believed that civilisation in all its tragic glory demanded repression of desires: the free play of polymorphous perversity could never be compatible with cultural order. Attitudes towards homosexuality could, indeed would, change, but it would always have to be judged by the norm set by heterosexual genitality. That was the organisation of sexuality that culture demanded and there seemed to be no alternative to that. Here was the point where the theory of the unconscious clashed with the politics of desire, and where the conservative cast of psychoanalysis obscured its radical impulse."(155-156)

[Dat zegt toch alles over die man en de psychoanalyse? Wat levert deze hele bespreking dan op, zo vraag ik me af?]

(157) Chapter 7 - Dangerous desires

[Nog meer zinloos gebazel over Freud en psychoanalyse. Vervolgens wordt het thema marxisme en psychoanalyse, wat altijd een ongemakkelijk huwelijk is geweest.]

"Alfred Adler made an early attempt to relate Marx and Freud even before his break with the latter. In 1909 he delivered a paper ‘On the Psychology of Marxism’ to Freud’s Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, which did not, it seems, arouse overwhelming enthusiasm. From 1919 Paul Federn was writing as a socialist Freudian, and he was to be a major influence on Wilhelm Reich. By the 1930s there were a number of ‘Freudo- Marxists’ in Central Europe and they even produced offshoots in the rather more unfavourable climate of Britain.
The background to this new intellectual formation was essentially political. Freudo-Marxism grew in the first place out of theoretical attempts to understand the failure of the revolution in the west in the early 1920s. Psychoanalysis and in particular the theory of repression was viewed as a powerful analytical tool in understanding the perpetuation of passive and/or authoritarian values." [mijn nadruk] (160)

Daarna Frankfurters (Fromm, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Habermas). Met name bespreking van Reich, van Marcuse.

"Freudo-Marxism suffers from a number of problems which in the end takes it no further than the Freudianism it claims to supplant. It depends in the first place on a theory of sexuality which, because of its rigid biologism, is ahistorical to a degree which Freud’s actually is not. Reich and Marcuse both have different views of what the sexual drive is, and both agree it is modifiable by repression, but they also agree on the existence of a common instinctual structure across all cultures. They are thus unable in the end to transcend the traditional dualism between man and society. " [mijn nadruk] (168)

"Following on from this, it has led secondly and inevitably to an identification of social and sexual liberation. The release of sexual energy is seen as beneficent and liberating in a way which is strongly reminiscent of the pre-Freudian romantics. This has been an important emphasis against a socialist tradition which has tended to ignore issues of sexuality and sexual difference, but it has also led to a moral position which has been as normative and restrictive in its implications as the bourgeois forms it aims to challenge. " [mijn nadruk] (168-169)

[Dat laatste wordt hier helemaal niet duidelijk gemaakt. ]

"Unlike the later Freud, none of the Freudo-Marxists are particularly concerned with the shaping of female sexuality (in fact, the Frankfurt School as a whole has shown little interest in gender division). The result, inevitably, is to fall into the assumption that masculinity and femininity are simply active and passive forms of the same sexual drive. The concentration on a simple antinomy of sexuality and culture avoids the complex but crucial question of the psychic and social shaping of masculinity and femininity (and it is indicative that whereas Reich sees the Oedipus Complex as more or less a natural process, Marcuse almost ignores it). " [mijn nadruk] (169)

[Ik begrijp al die positiviteit over Freud niet. Juist op dit punt was en bleef hij gewoon een conservatief onwetend burgermannetje.]

"The crucial contribution of Freudo-Marxism has been to reassert the centrality of sexual transformation to a wider social transformation. Its moral energy and vigour has allowed the regeneration of a largely abandoned nineteenth-century tradition. But the forms of that revival have been no less ahistorical than Freud’s. In seeking a totalising theory in which the social and the sexual are seen as differentiated manifestations of a single process of repression, the specifics of sex regulation are irreparably lost. Within this discourse Freud and Marx make uneasy bedfellows: to the detriment of both. "(170)

Volgt een bespreking van de psychoanalyse van Lacan.

"Lacanian psychoanalysis has had an influence way beyond the limits of clinical discourse: in anthropology, within Marxism and widely in other post-structuralist writing (for instance the work of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault). But more relevantly here it has been widely appropriated within feminism and contemporary sexual politics. The work of Kristeva, Cixous, Irigaray, in French feminist writings, whatever the ultimate fate of their allegiance to Lacan, and the work of Juliet Mitchell, Rosalind Coward and Jane Gallop, amongst others, in Anglo-American discourse, testifies to the vitality of the Lacanian contribution."(171)

"There are many sources which shape sexual patterns. The corollary is that many forms of sexuality result, differentiated along lines of class, generations, geography, religion, nationality, ethnic and racial grouping. There are sexualities, not a single sexuality. In the western world today all definitions of the erotic are hegemonised by the prime importance imputed to ‘the sexual’ (as a source of identity, pleasure and power), and in particular to male heterosexuality. Sexology has played a major part in legitimising these definitions. But this dominance is in reality but a precarious welding together of a huge sexual diversity. A product of a living past, this underlying pluralism provides the opportunity for change in the future. Here at last we can refind the dangers of desire, many-sided, polymorphous, malleable but disruptive — and historical. " [mijn nadruk] (179)

"What I hope to have established is that no theory of sexuality can be complete which ignores the lessons of the discovery of the dynamic unconscious. Two lessons particularly stand out. Firstly, psychoanalysis has established the problematic nature of identity. This was clearly there in Freud; the message had a curious trajectory through the work of other writers; it has been reaffirmed in the recent celebration of the flux of sexuality by feminist writings and by Deleuze and Guattari in their different ways. Whatever the vagaries of their thought, ranging from the pessimism of Freud to the anarcho-amoralism of recent writers, here is a gain which theorists of sexuality must increasingly take into account. Secondly, the debate around psychoanalysis has also demonstrated the potency of social norms and institutional formations. The possibility exists within the discourse of accepting them (as Freud did to some extent) or rejecting them (as many sexual radicals have sought to do). What cannot be done is to ignore them. " [mijn nadruk] (180)

[Tja, alleen bestaat dat dynamisch onbewuste niet.]

(183) Part Four - The boundaries of sexuality

(185) Chapter 8 - ‘Movements of affirmation’: identity politics

"Yet we know, simultaneously, and often from the same people who so passionately affirm their sexual identity, that such an identity is provisional, ever precarious, dependent upon, and constantly challenged by, an unstable relation of unconscious forces, changing social and personal meanings, and historical contingencies"(186)

[Als dat zo is, waarom praten we hier dan nog over? Ik heb een hekel aan reductionisten, maar ik krijg ook steeds meer een hekel aan iemand als Weeks die alles eindeloos ingewikkeld maakt en daardoor in een wolk van vaagheid blijft hangen.]

"We are increasingly aware that sexuality is about flux and change, that what we call ‘sexual’ is as much a product of language and culture as of nature."(186)

[Of anders gezegd. Ik houd evenmin van essentialisme, maar ook niet van poststructuralisme / postmodernisme waarin er geen waarheid bestaat en alles een gevolg is van een toevallige samenloop van omstandigheden. Meer vaags volgt over identiteit als begrip, over definities van homoseksualiteit, seksuele minderheden en zo meer. Ik ga er maar snel door heen.]

"The view that attributes all women’s oppression to ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ suggests that somehow women are always socially controlled by men, who stand outside history, towering over it like Zeus with his hands around the globe. Women are inevitably presented, in consequence, as perpetual sufferers and victims. The struggles of women, the resistances they have offered and changes they have fashioned, are silenced in the portrayal of the timeless rule of heterosexual domination. But we know that forms of heterosexuality have changed; that male power has been challenged and sometimes undermined; that women have changed the conditions of their lives. Oppression is not monolithic, nor is it exercised purely through sexual control; and the diverse and contradictory forms of domination do allow space for challenge and change. " [mijn nadruk] (205)

"Identity is not a destiny but a choice. But in a culture where homosexual desires, female or male, are still execrated and denied, the adoption of lesbian or gay identities inevitably constitutes a political choice. These identities are not expressions of secret essences. They are self-creations, but they are creations on ground not freely chosen but laid out by history."(209)

(211) Chapter 9 - The meaning of diversity

"The questions that insistently arise from this ecological chaos go something like this: can each desire be equally valid; should each minute subdivision of desire be the basis of a sexual and possibly social identity; is each political identity of equal weight in the corridors of sexual politics, let alone wider politics? Sex, where is your morality? the moral authoritarian can cry. Sex, where are your subtle distinctions? the weary liberal might whisper.
The inherent difficulty of responding to these interrogations is compounded by the absence of consensus on them within the radical sexual movements themselves. There is little solidarity amongst the sexually oppressed. Lesbians dissociate themselves from the ‘public sex’ of gay men. Gay leaders dissociate themselves from paedophiles. Paedophiles can see little relevance in feminism. And the ranks of feminism are split asunder by divisions on topics such as pornography, sadomasochism and sex itself.
Does pornography constitute an act of violence against women or is it simply a reflection of wider problems? Is intergenerational sex a radical disruption of age expectations or a traditional assault by older people on younger? Is transsexuality a question of control over one’s body, or another twist in the medical control of it? Is promiscuity a challenge to sexual repression or a surrender to its consumerised form? Is sado-masochism no more than a ritualised and theatrical enactment of power relations or is it a sinister embrace of socially constructed fantasies? Are butch-fem relations the erotic working through of chosen roles or the replication of oppressive relations? These are not always heated debates in the wider society. They excite enormous controversy in the ranks of the sexually oppressed." [mijn nadruk] (213-214)

[Tja, als je onder postmoderne invloed staat is alles even goed en alles even belangrijk. Geen wonder dat niemand het ooit met elkaat eens is.]

"The moral absolutists, old and new, have another similarity. In an exact mirror image of the libertarian position, they too concentrate on a morality of acts, where sin or salvation resides in the activity itself. The litany of activities and variations — pornography, promiscuity, paedophilia, sado-masochism — is a checklist of original sin, which does not, in the end, seem very different from the old thesaurus of ecclesiastical anathemas or medical definitions. Political alliances are never neutral. In a context where sex has become a political front line, where moral issues become the displaced arena for arguing about what sort of society we want to live in, then these alignments and divisions are of crucial importance. Their effect in shaping the climate in which the erotic minorities have to live can be decisive. On certain issues many feminists have objectively allied with the Right. Ellen Willis has commented that ‘as the sexuality debate goes, so goes feminism.’ Equally, it seems, as feminism goes, so goes sexuality.
The radical pluralist approach is more tentative than the absolutist or libertarian traditions, though it draws inspiration from the sex positive elements of the latter. And it is more decisively aware of the network of power-relations in which sex is embedded than the liberal approach, though being properly aware of the mobilising force of the discourse of rights and of sexual choice. Its aim is to provide guidelines for decisions rather than new absolute values, but two inter-related elements are crucial: the emphasis on choice and relations rather than acts, and the emphasis on meaning and context rather than external rules of correctness. " [mijn nadruk] (217-218)

Hierna wordt een aantal thema's besproken vanuit die optiek. De eerste is 'Public sex’ and the right to privacy. Homoseksualiteit wordt uitgebreid besproken als een apart probleem hierbinnen (de bars en clubs en badhuizen en het 'promiscue gedrag', tegenover de net zo'n grote behoefte aan warme relaties, en zo verder).

"For a long time we have cherished sex as the most private of secrets. We talked about it incessantly but shrouded its details with a discreet veil. For several hundred years now, especially in the Anglo-American heartlands of puritanism, the entrepreneurs of social morality have strenuously engaged in struggles against public manifestations of sexual vice in order to reinforce this private domain. Behind the fights against alcoholism, obscenity, prostitution and homosexuality lay a profound belief that while individual moral reformation was the key to salvation, religious and secular, a cleaning up of public spaces, a remoralisation of public life, was a decisive element in encouraging personal change. The moral panics, purity crusades, police interventions and state regulation that punctuate the history of sexuality are the results of such evangelical fervour. Their effects are manifest in the shifting and ambiguous divisions between public and private life that we inhabit today. " [mijn nadruk] (218-219)

Het tweede thema is Intergenerational sex and consent . Ook hier brengt Weeks het thema homoseksualiteit in:

"The real curiosity is that while the actuality is of largely adult male exploitation of young girls, often in and around the home, male homosexuals have frequently been seen as the chief corrupters, to the extent that in some rhetoric ‘homosexual’ and ‘child molesters’ are coequal terms.(...) Not surprisingly, given this typical association, homosexuality and intergenerational sex have been intimately linked in the current crisis over sexuality."(224)

Hij noemt Kinsey en Tom O'Carroll die pedofilie niet negatief benaderen.

"Tom O’Carroll, whose Paedophilia: The Radical Case is the most sustained advocacy of the subject, suggested that:

The usual mistake is to believe that sexual activity, especially for children, is so alarming and dangerous that participants need to have an absolute, total awareness of every conceivable ramification of taking part before they can be said to consent...there is no need whatever for a child to know ‘the consequences’ of engaging in harmless sex play, simply because it is exactly that: harmless.

There are two powerful arguments against this. The first, put forward by many feminists, is that young people, especially young girls, do need protection from adult men in an exploitative and patriarchal society, whatever the utopian possibilities that might exist in a different society." [mijn nadruk] (225)

[Het is waar dat de meeste mannen (en vrouwen) niet deugen, maar een argument voor bescherming sluit altijd van alles uit: 1/ alle mannen worden gemakzuchtig over een kam geschoren; 2/ er wordt niets gedaan om mannen qua mentaliteit te veranderen, sterker nog: ook feministen bevestigen ze de hele tijd in hun typische masculiene gedrag; 3/ nog precieser: alle aandacht gaat uit naar de seks, maar er wordt niets gedaan om het gewelddadige karakter van de samenleving en van de mannen (en vrouwen) (alle competitite, in sport, in games, in SM, in oorlog voeren) daarin te veranderen; 4/ die meisjes worden klein gehouden, hun 'agency' wordt niet erkend, omdat een aantal oudere dames het beter zeggen te weten.]

"Secondly, there is the difficult and intricate problem of subjective meaning. The adult is fully aware of the sexual connotations of his actions because he (and it is usually he) lives in a world of heavily sexualised symbols and language. The young person does not. In a recent study of twenty-five boys engaged in homosexual paedophile relations the author, Theo Sandfort, found that ‘Potentially provocative acts which children make are not necessarily consciously intended to be sexual and are only interpreted by the older persons as having a sexual element.’ This indicates an inherent and inevitable structural imbalance in awareness of the situation. Against this, it might be argued that it is only the exalted cultural emphasis we place on sex that makes this an issue. That is undoubtedly true, but it does not remove the fact of that ascribed importance. We cannot unilaterally escape the grid of meaning that envelops us. "(226)

[Ook een erg zwak argument. Mannen en vrouwen ervaren dngen ook verschillend, zwart en wit, gehandicapt of niet, afkomst, eerdere ervaringen, alles speelt mee in hoe we dingen ervaren / betekenis geven. Oud en jong dus ook. Wat is het probleem als dingen verschillend worden ervaren? Als het plezierig en fijn is is dat ook voor een jongere aanvaardbaar, al wordt het etiketje 'seks' nergens opgeplakt. Waarom moet je meteen die overdreven culturele nadruk op wat seks is loslaten op de situatie? Bovendien: jongeren weten meer dan hier wordt gesuggereerd, zeker vandaag de dag.]

"The second legitimation relies on the facts of childhood sexuality. O’Carroll carefully assesses the evidence for the existence of childhood sex to argue for the oppressiveness of its denial. But of course an ‘is’ does not necessarily make an ‘ought’, nor does the acceptance of childhood sex play inevitably mean the toleration of adult-child relations. " [mijn nadruk] (226)

[Dat is-ought-argument is waar, maar de feiten over kinderen en hun seksuele ontwikkeling en alle variaties daarin geven desondanks te denken over de negatieve normen en waarden die volwassenen er op dat vlak op na houden. En die kinderlijke seksuele ontwikkeling zegt in principe inderdaad niets over seksuele relaties tussen volwassenen en jongeren, het pleit er niet voor, maar ook niet tegen. Desondanks: in het vervolg is Weeks een stuk kritischer en bestrijdt hij een aantal standaard mythen zoals ik dat ook steeds doe:]

"It is difficult to confront the issue rationally because of the series of myths that shroud the topic. (...) The adult is usually seen as ‘a dirty old man’, typically ‘a stranger’ to the assaulted child, as ‘sick’ or an ‘inhuman monster’. Little of this seems to be true, at least of those we might describe as the political paedophile. He is scarcely an ‘old man’ (the membership of the English Paedophile Information Exchange, PIE, varied in age from 20 to over 60, with most clustered between 35 and 40); he is more likely to be a professional person than the average member of the population (only 14 per cent of PIE members were blue collar workers); he is more often than not a friend or relation of the child; and to outward appearances is not a ‘special type of person’ but an apparently healthy and ordinary member of the community. His chief distinguishing characteristic is an intense, but often highly affectionate and even excessively sentimental, regard for young people.
The sexual involvement itself is typically seen as being an assault on extremely young, usually pre-pubertal, people. The members of PIE, which generally is preoccupied with relations with pre-pubertal children, seem chiefly interested in boys between 12 and 14, though heterosexual paedophiles tended to be interested in girls between 8 and 10. This is less startling than the stereotype of babies barely out of the cradle being assaulted but poses nevertheless difficult questions about where protection and care ends and exploitation begins." [mijn nadruk] (226-227)

"The young people themselves are typically seen as innocent victims. Certainly, many children are cruelly assaulted by adults, but in relations involving self-identified paedophiles or ‘boy lovers’ there seems to be no evidence of either cruelty or violence. Sandfort found that in his sample the boys overwhelmingly experienced their sexual activities as positive. The most common evaluative terms used were ‘nice’, ‘happy’, ‘free’, ‘safe’, ‘satisfied’, and even ‘proud’ and ‘strong’; and only minimally were negative terms such as ‘angry’, ‘sad’, ‘lonely’ used. Even when these negative terms were used, it was largely because of the secrecy often necessary and the knowledge of hostile norms and reactions, not because of the sexual contact itself. There is strong evidence that the trauma of public exposure and of parental and police involvement is often greater than the trauma of the sex itself. Moreover, many adult-child relations are initiated by the young person himself. "(228)

Er is sprake van grote diversiteit hier.

"Firstly, there is a continuum of beliefs and attitudes, from the actual violent assaulter at one end to the political paedophile at the other. These can not readily be put in the same class for approval or disapproval."(229)

"It is not obvious that all people involved in intergenerational sex should be treated in the same way by the law or public opinion if intentions or desires are very distinct. "(229)

"A second continuum is of sexual practices. Some researchers have found coitus rare. It seems that the great majority of heterosexual paedophilia consists of ‘sex play’, such as looking, showing and fondling, and much homosexual involvement seems to be similar."(229)

"But protection of the very young from unwanted attentions will always be necessary. The difficult question is when does protection become stifling paternalism and ‘adult oppression’. Puberty is one obvious landmark, but the difficulty of simply adopting this as a dividing point is that physiological change does not necessarily coincide with social or subjective changes. It is here that it is inescapably necessary to shift focus, to explore the meanings of the sex play for the young people involved. " [mijn nadruk] (230)

"If a progressive sexual politics is fundamentally concerned with sexual self-determination then it becomes impossible to ignore the evolving self-awareness of the child. That means discouraging the unwelcome imposition of adult meanings and needs on the child, not simply because they are sexual but because they are external and adult. On the other hand, it does mean providing young people with full access to the means of sexual knowledge and protection as it becomes appropriate. There is no magic age for this ‘appropriateness’. Each young person will have their own rhythms, needs and time scale. But the starting point can only be the belief that sex in itself is not an evil or dirty experience. It is not sex that is dangerous but the social relations which shape it." [mijn nadruk] (230)

[Prachtig! De kern van de zaak goed samengevat.]

Het derde thema is Pornography and power.

"It is scarcely surprising, then, that pornography should be a major issue in sexual politics. Long a concern of the moral right, it has become a crucial preoccupation of contemporary feminism. In the United States by the early 1980s the feminist campaigns against pornography were perhaps the best organised and financed in the movement’s history and, though they did not have the same salience, there were similarly energetic groupings in countries like Britain and Australia. But at the same time the campaign against pornography seemed to divide the women’s movement, for it posed fundamental questions about the nature of female subordination, and hence of the forms of power in contemporary society." [mijn nadruk] (231-232)

"The danger of this position [de feministes die tegen pornografie ten strijde trokken zoals Dworkin - GdG] is that it might exaggerate the power of pornography, and elide crucial distinctions which exist within the pornography industry. Violence against women — economic, social, public and domestic, intellectual and sexual — is endemic in our culture and some of this is portrayed in pornographic representations. But not all pornography — perhaps not even the major part — portrays or encourages violence, while the most violent representations themselves may carry their own forms of irony."(233-234)

"It would be foolish to dispute the power of representation. Images help organise the way we can conceive of the external world and can shape our intimate desire. But there is no reason to believe that the effects will be unilinear or uniform. Susan Barrowclough has pointed out that the feminist antiporn discourse makes three assumptions: that the male viewer’s fantasy is the same as the pornographic fantasy; that the pornographic image directly influences behaviour; and that there is an undifferentiated mass of male viewers, all of whom act in the same way and identify with the same point of view. Each of these assumptions is counterable. The huge variety of porn attests to the variety of tastes and desires. Not all men enjoy pornography. And there is very little evidence for any direct correlation between fantasy and behaviour. The shifts in the content of pornography or the changes in its organisation and incidence may indicate important changes in the social relations of sexuality, including attitudes towards women. But it is difficult to see how pornography as a contradictory practice could be instrumental in producing these changes.
In the end, for old and new moral absolutists, for left and right, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the real objection to pornography is moral, however this is coded. That is fair enough if all that is at stake is a personal position, but it seems a poor ground for making proposals which may have universal effects either through the censoring of pornography, or through a fierce attack on those who consume it, whoever they are and whatever their motives." [mijn nadruk] (234-235)

Weeks conclusie:

"A singular concentration on pornography gives it a political centrality it does not deserve, and in the process the real strategic problems of radical sexual politics are downplayed or ignored. By concentrating on the power of the image in pornography alone the manifold ways in which sexual oppression is produced and reproduced in our culture — in law, medicine, religion, the family, psychiatry — are lost sight of. Ironically, it also means that the pervasive interpretation of sexist imagery throughout the culture, in advertising and the media, even in ‘romantic fiction’, is largely ignored in favour of a dramatic assault on pornography. The sexual oppression and exploitation of women cannot be reduced to pornography, and it is unlikely that a mass assault on the pornography industry will do much to change the position of women. "(236)

[Erg goede conclusie ook.]

Weeks vierde bespreekthema is The sexual fringe and sexual choice , het debat over sadomasochisme in relatie tot macht.

"Sado-masochism itself is a tiny minority activity, and is likely to remain so. The latent imperialism of its claims — that S/Mers have a special insight into the truth of sexuality, that extreme forms of sexuality are peculiarly cathartic or revelationary, or that we must go to the limits to experience heightened pleasures — is never likely to win over the reluctant and the hesitant. Nor are the arguments entirely convincing or consistent."(239)

Het thema hierna is Refusing to refuse the body.

"Any progressive approach to the question of sexuality must balance the autonomy of individuals against the necessity of collective endeavour and common cause. But where the exact parameters of the relationship should be is perhaps the most delicate and difficult problem for contemporary sexual politics. Inevitably, as Sue Cartledge has sensitively argued, there is a conflict between ‘Duty and Desire’ in which individual needs can all too readily become twisted and distorted to meet the constraints of obligation — to abstract cause or imagined ideal. But, equally, the celebration of individual desires over all else can lead to the collapse of any collective activity, all social movements and any prospect of real change. "(241)

Weer de aanduidingen van absolutisme en liberalisme als de verkeerde wegen en een pleidooi voor een radicaal pluralisme.

"A radical pluralist approach starts with the recognition that certain conflicts of needs, desires and ambitions can never readily be resolved. Its governing principle is that no attempt should be made to reduce human sexual diversity to a uniform form of ‘correct’ behaviour. It does not argue, however, that all forms of sexual behaviour are equally valid, regardless of consequences, nor does it endorse the laissez-faire pluralism of the typical liberal approach, which is unable to think through values and distinctions. On the contrary, radical pluralism is sensitive to the workings of power, alive to the struggles needed to change the existing social relations which constrain sexual autonomy, and based upon the ‘collective self-activity’ of those oppressed by the dominant sexual order. The most significant development in sexual politics over the past generation has not been a new volubility of sexual need, nor the new sexual markets, nor the proliferation of sexual styles or practices. It has been the appearance of new sexual-political subjects, constituting new ‘communities of interest’ in political terms who have radically transformed the meaning of sexual politics. The sexually oppressed have spoken more explicitly than ever before on their own behalf: and if there is often confusion and ambiguity and contradictions between different groups, and even within single movements, this seems a small and possibly temporary price to pay for what is ultimately a major transformation of the political scene. There is a new sexual democracy struggling to be born and if its gestation seems over long, with a number of unforeseen complications, there is every indication that the neonate can still grow into a vigorous, healthy maturity. " [mijn nadruk] (242-243)

[Dat klinkt allemaal mooi, maar ook een radicaal pluralisme kent grenzen en beperkt bepaalde seksuele activiteiten of zou dat moeten doen. Al die verschillende groepen die voor hun eigen belang opkomen en erkenning willen, is dat het dan? Geen standpunten ten aanzien van pornografie, sm, pedofilie of allerlei andere discutabele vormen van seksualiteit? Geen standpunten over machtsverhoudingen? Alles reguleert zichzelf omdat regulatie van 'bovenaf' niet hoort? Ik vind dat radicale pluralisme wel erg gemakkelijk.]

"‘Democracy’ seems an odd word to apply to the sexual sphere. ‘Sexuality’ as we have seen in this book is a phenomenon which is typically understood as being outside the rules of social organisation. We celebrate its unruliness, spontaneity and wilfulness, not its susceptibility to calculation and decision-making. But it is surely a new form of democracy that is called for when we speak of the right to control our bodies, when we claim ‘our bodies are our own’. " [mijn nadruk] (243)

[Ook die claim dat we de baas zijn over ons eigen lichaam - het recht om te kiezen - is niet onproblematisch. Vanaf welke leeftijd bijvoorbeeld? Een kind van zeven dat piercings wil. Een kind van vijf dat niet ingeënt wil worden. Een meisje van negen dat bij de aardige buurman wil slapen. Een vrouw die in de achtste maand van haar zwangerschap een abortus wil. Een man van 65 die dood wil, terwijl hij nog gezond is. Vragen genoeg op dit vlak.]

"This surely is the hallmark of the new politics of sexuality, and its organising principle is the celebration of pleasure. (...) Pleasure, yes, but not pleasure selfishly attained: pleasure in the context of new codes and of new types of relationships. It is this that makes the new pluralism radical. The new relationships may not yet exist on a large scale. But in the inventiveness of the radical sexual movements in creating new ways of life lies the ultimate challenge to the power of definition hitherto enjoyed by the sexologists and the sexual tradition."(245)

(246) Chapter 10 - Conclusion: beyond the boundaries of sexuality

[Veel herhaling hier, logischerwijs.]

"This brings us to the second major difficulty I referred to earlier: that of ‘sexual politics’. In practice most of the early sexologists were progressive in their sympathies, whatever the normalising impact of their theories on individual lives. Sexologists such as Krafft-Ebing, Freud, Alfred Kinsey, Masters and Johnson were (or are) broadly liberal in their attitudes to law reform, sex education, state harassment of sexual minorities and the like, while others, such as Havelock Ellis in his early days, Carpenter, Hirschfeld, Federn, Adler, as well as the more familiar names of Reich, Marcuse and Fromm, had close socialist affiliations. Generally they all saw themselves as part of the historic sweep towards a more humane and generous and rational society, and felt themselves, to some degree, as oppositional to existing bastions of power. There was no great caesura between sexual theory and sexual politics. Many of the pioneers were involved in sex reform movements or provided the inspiration for radical sexual politics. The sex reformers relied on the sexual theorists to give scientific backing to their political campaigns and became in a real sense the political arm of the sexologists. This is clearly no longer the case. " [mijn nadruk] (250)

"But on the left, especially in the wake of the theoretical deconstruction of ‘sexuality’ that has been undertaken by radical psychoanalysts, sociologists and historians, there can be no esoteric ‘truth’ of sex to be uncovered by diligent research; only perspectives on contending ‘truths’ whose evaluation is essentially political rather than scientific. " [mijn nadruk] (251)

[Waarom wordt dat 'politiek' genoemd en niet normatief of moreel? Vanwege de historische associaties met moralisme en zo? Onnodig.]

"The majestic edifice of ‘sexuality’ was constructed in a long history, by many hands, and refracted through many minds. Its ‘laws’, norms and proscriptions still organise and control the lives of millions of people. But its unquestioned reign is approaching an end. Its intellectual incoherence has long been rumbled; its secular authority has been weakened by the practice and politics of those social-sexual movements produced by its own contradictions and excesses; now we have the opportunity to construct an alternative vision based on a realistic hope for the end of sexual domination and subordination, for new sexual and social relations, for new, and genuine, opportunities for pleasure and choice. We have the chance to regain control of our bodies, to recognise their potentialities to the full, to take ourselves beyond the boundaries of sexuality as we know it. All we need is the political commitment, imagination and vision. The future now, as ever, is in our hands. "(260)